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With all the new Facebook features coming out seemingly on a daily basis, Facebook is quickly becoming an all-encompassing utility that has outgrown its original social media conception. In the beginning, Facebook was a simple tool to connect with friends and family and share your world with others – It is now a complex platform that is used for so much more including marketing, and more recently, interacting with local businesses. October 2016 brought a welcomed selection of additions to the ever-expanding range of Facebook Utilities – What do these additions offer and how can they change the way you conduct business?

What changes have been implemented?

Recommendations – What do you do if you want to find a quality hairdresser in your local area? You can now use Facebook to do so! The recommendations feature allows you to request information from your contacts pertaining to local businesses. For example, you could ask “I need my car servicing – Which garages are reliable?” this would appear on your timeline and your friends can respond by tagging local businesses in the comments!

Events –Maybe you want to check out what events are happening in your local area? Traditionally you might have to check the newspaper – Facebook can now facilitate this instead, and you can even use the platform to purchase tickets! Organisations and individuals can create events and invite their followers – if your friends are attending these events, it will display in your events tab.

Business interactions – The final, and possibly most exciting addition is the new business features. Facebook now facilitates the following for businesses – Ordering food, requesting appointments, and requesting quotes! Yes, that’s right; you can now order a Kebab on Facebook or book that overdue haircut from your smartphone! These new Facebook features use a combination of messenger and the Facebook platform to provide interactions between a business and its customers.

How can these changes impact your life and business?

Convenience is the key point to take away from this set of exciting new additions. These new Facebook features are effectively making your life easier and giving you access to a whole host of new information and possibilities.

For businesses, the potential to increase your exposure and sales is great – This provides another avenue of business and another way that potential customer can interact with your organisation. Consider this – How many people use Facebook on a daily basis? The numbers are staggering and by implementing things like “Request a quote” buttons, the business process becomes so much easier and accessible.

Customers will be able to directly interact with your business with minimal effort. Furthermore, Facebook is accessible 24/7, therefore, these new features are not constrained by your business opening hours – A customer could request a quote at 9 pm in the evening for example, and you could simply access your page via your smartphone or tablet and respond to the quote promptly!

For small companies, Facebook will now serve as a viable form of advertisement and a platform from which they can conduct their business. With careful planning, and optimising the use the quote and appointment features, businesses can dominate the local market and greatly increase their potential customer base.

Noisybird are social media and content marketing experts and are dedicated to helping you get heard online. If you would like to discuss this article or any of our services in greater detail then please feel free to get in touch. Give us a call on 0113 314 1979 or drop us an email at hello@noisybird.co.uk.